Tempo and mode of climatic niche evolution in Primates

Abstract

Climatic niches have increasingly become a nexus in our understanding of a variety of ecological and evolutionary phenomena, from species distributions to latitudinal diversity gradients. Despite the increasing availability of comprehensive datasets on species ranges, phylogenetic histories, and georeferenced environmental conditions, studies on the evolution of climate niches have only begun to understand how niches evolve over evolutionary timescales. Here, using primates as a model system, we integrate recently developed phylogenetic comparative methods, species distribution patterns, and climatic data to explore primate climatic niche evolution, both among clades and over time. In general, we found that simple, constant-rate models provide a poor representation of how climatic niches evolve. For instance, there have been shifts in the rate of climatic niche evolution in several independent clades, particularly in response to the increasingly cooler climates of the past 10 My. Interestingly, rate accelerations greatly outnumbered rate decelerations. These results highlight the importance of considering more realistic evolutionary models that allow for the detection of heterogeneity in the tempo and mode of climatic niche evolution, as well as to infer possible constraining factors for species distributions in geographical space.

A major shift in diversification rate helps explain macroevolutionary patterns in primate species diversity

“…A previous analysis of the evolution of climatic niches found a greater number of diversification rate shifts among cercopithecids than any other primate clade (Duran and Pie 2015), suggesting that these shifts may be related to the presence of more variable climatic environments (e.g., montane regions, or ecosystems with monsoons). A previous analysis of the evolution of climatic niches found a greater number of diversification rate shifts among cercopithecids than any other primate clade (Duran and Pie 2015), suggesting that these shifts may be related to the presence of more variable climatic environments (e.g., montane regions, or ecosystems with monsoons).…”

Climatic niche evolution in turtles is characterized by phylogenetic conservatism for both aquatic and terrestrial species

“…Our study represents, to our knowledge, the first one evaluating the existence of phylogenetic conservatism of climatic niches across the whole turtle clade. Climatic niche conservatism is a well‐studied subject in several vertebrate groups (Duran & Pie, ; Duran et al., ; Mcnyset, ; Peixoto et al., ; Peterson, ; Pie et al., ), but in turtles, it is still poorly explored. The few studies that have evaluated niche conservatism in this group found a mix of evidence for both divergence and conservatism, mainly in the biological invasions scenario (Liu et al., ; Rödder et al., ; Rodrigues, Coelho, & Diniz‐Filho, ; Rodrigues, Coelho, Varela, et al., ).…”

“…Although evolutionary patterns of species' climatic niches have been recently evaluated in many taxa (Duran, Meyer, & Pie, 2013;Duran & Pie, 2015;Mcnyset, 2009;Peixoto, Villalobos, & Cianciaruso, 2017;Peterson, 2011;Pie, Campos, Meyer, & Duran, 2017), few studies have tested whether patterns of climatic niche evolution are related to other taxon traits. In mammals, for example, species occurring in the tropics, with small range sizes or with specialized diets have climatic niches that are more conserved than temperate, widely distributed and diet-generalist mammals (Cooper, Freckleton, & Jetz, 2011).…”

Evolution of a complex phenotype with biphasic ontogeny: Contribution of development versus function and climatic variation to skull modularity in toads

“…We extracted the climatic data from all localities where species from the R. granulosa complex are reported to occur (Narvaes, 2003) using DIVA-GIS software. Given that temperature and precipitation data have very different scales (°C and mm) and that variances of precipitation data are much higher than temperature data, we opted to transform all climatic data using the z-score transformation (e.g., Duran & Pie, 2015) before constructing a climatic correlation matrix and extracting its principal components (PCs ; Table S4). We followed Desdevises et al (2003) to decide which PCo axes of the V/CV P-matrix dissimilarity were the dependent variables: only the ones for which there were significant correlations with any independent factor.…”